Lover of trading, tacos, 3D/AR/VR, cryptos, and most things Japanese

I just returned from a productive meeting with my old boss. We sat in the atrium at the DTC Marriott and chatted for about 90 minutes about his business idea, Social Media and UI integration, and next steps moving forward. Things are starting to pop! There’s a lot of opportunity starting to become available, and we’re going to tap into that and try to make some bank along the way.

There was no need to sell him on the importance of a Social Media plan or strategy, that’s what he came to me for in the first place. The UI work is more of an added bonus on how I can contribute to the venture. So it would seem I have a new job now. There’s no pay at the moment, but it is the opportunity to get in on the ground floor for what could become a good, profitable business – with ownership. And it gives me a real reason to get to work, to expand my skills and apply my expertise – if nothing else, it’s good resume material. Add to that the contacts he has in the consulting business and his connections with large media companies and there are other opportunities in the pipeline as well.

I’ll post more specifics about the company when we’re ready to launch to the public, right now things are in private beta and, while there is no official NDA in place, we need to be careful about releasing details before we go into public beta, which should be in about two months. It’s a good fit all around, it’s the type of work I want to be doing, and I’m looking forward to getting to work on the project.

This will also give me cause to get out of the house and go to my other “office”, the local Starbucks, on a daily basis once things get underway. Right now I’m figuring that it will be next week before I get to start the real work. The rest of this week will be getting things in place, administrative tasks, account setups, email addresses, etc. My laptop is configured and ready to rock; I’ve spent much of the last year working from it. I still prefer working from my workstation, as I’m a bit of a keyboard size snob and really don’t care for typing on the laptop – or using its trackpad instead of a mouse, but such are the sacrifices one must make to move forward. 😉

I’ll need to brush up on responsive web design so that the site can continue to be mobile-ready. It’s been a few years since I’ve coded specifically for mobile and a lot has changed in the interim. Still, it’s just a matter of implementation rather than a whole new learning curve. I’ve done it before, I’ll do it again. Hello YouTube!

We’ve gotten a small taste of what those in the northeast are going through – we got six inches of snow last night and this morning. Since the streets haven’t been plowed and the snow was so deep, I opted not to try to venture out in my little car today and rescheduled my regular Monday appointment for Thursday.

After brushing off my car, I got back to my former boss who reached out to me over the weekend. He and I had met for lunch a few months ago; we worked together at a startup back in the late 90s called the i1 Television Network. The company broadcast video games on cable television that people could call in and play along with on their touch tone phones. This was long enough ago that we had to specify touch tone, as people still had rotary dial phones in their houses. A great concept that couldn’t get funded and only lasted about a year.

i1 was, to date, one of my all time favorite jobs. I was hired to do video editing and ultimately ended up doing animation, design, asset creation, game testing, and managing the Creative team. My boss and I were both avid golfers and would sometimes grab a quick nine holes during lunch or in the late afternoons. We also teamed up to build a shareware blackjack game – he did the coding and I developed all the in-game assets. We work well together and have always kept in touch.

Well, we spoke on the phone this morning for about thirty minutes. Catching up and laying plans. We set up a face to face meeting for tomorrow afternoon where we’ll sit down and go over specifics. He’s been working on a business idea for some time now and is getting to the point where it’s about ready to become a viable product, so it’s another startup situation. He’s interested in me doing Social Media and maybe some UI work, which is right in my wheelhouse. It’s an interesting concept with good potential.

Unfortunately, there’s no pay right now. As we’ve seen before, startups are risky ventures, and most fail. Still, we’re only talking about five hours a week on Social Media for now, with another maybe 100 hours over the next two months doing web and UI work. I need something to do until I find a full-time position somewhere. Plus, I’m jumping at the chance to work with him again. If things work out, I’ll get some ownership in the company too. So, while it’s nowhere near ideal, there are a lot of positives. I’ll find out more at our meeting tomorrow, but right now things are looking promising.

The other “news” is that I finally decided to sign up for Netflix again. I’d been putting it off for some time, but decided that I could spare the nine bucks a month to catch up on all the stuff I’ve missed these past couple years. The first thing I did after joining was to sit down and binge watch the first two seasons of House of Cards. 😉 Great show. Then I watched the Steve Jobs biopic with Ashton Kutcher, some standup by Aziz Ansari and Bill Burr, a bodybuilding flick called Generation Iron, The Wolf of Wall Street, Django Unchained, Chef, Stand Up Guys, the first two seasons of Breaking Bad, and I’m just starting Mad Men. I tried watching Anchorman 2, but only made it about halfway through it before turning it off. I don’t know if they have enough good content to keep me as a streaming-only subscriber, or maybe it’s just that there haven’t been a lot of great movies lately, but now that I have some views under my belt we’ll see what their recommendation engine comes up with. I guess if one good movie a month comes out, it’s still cheaper to watch online than go to the theaters, so I’ll probably keep it.

The last time I was snowed in like this I joined World of Warcraft and played for 35 hours straight. Fortunately, by then the snow had largely passed and I could get back in the world. Right now I’m just trapped for today. I made sure we had our meeting tomorrow if for no other reason than it would force me to get out of the house. I just hope the snow stops soon. Last week it was in the 60s, I can’t wait for that weather to return. Only two more weeks of February to go!

I had a client meeting this morning where we went over the web site work I’ve been doing for him for the past few months, and it looks like everything I’ve done, for very little money, has been for naught. I’ve migrated his site from Joomla to WordPress, integrated Jreviews after much dealing with their support, and now it appears that we have to go back to the Joomla site. This is very frustrating. All the work I’ve done, all the hours I’ve put in, looks like it may have been for nothing. Sigh.

Yesterday I went to Spur*, an espresso bar with communal workspaces, to get out of the house and into a go-to-the-office mode. It was a nice place, with a cool vibe, but its coffee was overpriced and only gave one free refill. I drink a lot of coffee when I work and I don’t think it’s going to be financially viable for me to go there as a regular office space. They also didn’t have any real food, just some pastries. It looks like I may have to resort to going to my local Starbucks again. At least they give free refills and have some comfy chairs. I’m finding myself a bit reluctant to do it though, probably because it will remind me of my time in Pueblo. Still, I may just have to do that to get out of the house on a regular basis. It is conveniently located, and there are good food options right there, I just need to get my head around the concept and move forward with it.

I need to write another post for Otaku. Right now I’m thinking of making it on how to grow follower counts in Twitter, as that’s what I’ve been spending a lot of time doing this past year. One of my goals for the year is to blog a lot more there about design, development and social media. Really build up a content base to help reinforce my expertise in these areas and make the site a worthy destination for others seeking information. Right now the home page is the “About” page, but I’ll switch it to the blog page once I get some more posts up.

I just got off the phone with Josh, the tech recruiter guy I interviewed with last week, and he has a Javascript developer position that he’s sending me the work req on. The pay is okay, not great, and it’s a nine month contract rather than a permanent position, but it could be a good stepping stone back into the working world and good Javascript front end experience too. I’m curious to see what they’re looking for in terms of Javascript expertise, and I’ll likely have to do some tutorial work to learn the framework they’re using, but that’s pretty much par for the course these days. Ya gotsta do whacha gotsta do.